About

I'm Andrew. I lead engineering at Kasa, a hospitality platform where my work has spanned financial systems, revenue management, integrations, and the engineering org itself. The resume tells that story properly. This page is the version of the story that doesn't fit on a resume.

Why I build

I started writing software because I liked the feeling of making something out of nothing, and that hasn't really worn off. Most of the projects on this site exist because there was something I wanted to use, or someone I wanted to give it to, or a problem I wanted to understand by being on the wrong side of it for a few weeks.

I don't think every engineer needs side projects, and I'm suspicious of the framing that they prove dedication. What they do give me is unblocked design control over the boring middle of a system — the auth, the queues, the deploys, the second-day operational tax — at a scale where I can hold the whole thing in my head. The things I learn that way show up in the day job within weeks, every time.

How I work

A few things I've come to believe, after long enough to be embarrassed about how long it took:

• Architecture is mostly a tax on the future paid by the present. It's worth paying when the future is real. It is not worth paying when the future is a fantasy you described in a Notion doc.
• Most “tech debt” is just a forecast someone got wrong. That's not a moral failing. The fix is usually to write down what you'd do differently with what you know now, not to flagellate over what you did with what you had at the time.
• AI is reshuffling the deck. Not replacing engineers, not making them obsolete — reshuffling the relative cost of different kinds of work. The engineers who do best in the next decade will be the ones who took it seriously early and treated it as a skill, not a toy or a threat.
• Boring deploys, careful tests, honest logs. None of those are interesting on their own. All three of them, every day, are most of what makes a team good.

I am at my best running small, focused engineering organizations where I can stay close enough to the code to remember what's actually hard about it. I have less interest in being a pure manager than my current title suggests, and I will probably always have a pull request open somewhere.

If you've read this far, the contact page is where to find me.